General News

Recent analysis of data from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) located in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Northern Minnesota, showed two events that may be the elusive Dark Matter "candidate" Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP).

Professors Priscilla Cushman and Vuk Mandic are involved in the CDMS collaboration along with post-doctoral fellow Oleg Kavaev and graduate students Scott Fallows Matt Fritts, and Jianjie Zhang. "Before you can declare a definitive discovery, you have to have confirmation from other experiments going on worldwide, as well as our own next-generation experiment," Cushman said in a recent interview. "There's about a one-in-four chance the signals are caused by ordinary interactions."

This was the final result of the CDMSII experiment. The collaboration has already installed the next generation of WIMP detector, SuperCDMS, which will employ larger detector modules to improve sensitivity by a factor of four beyond CDMS II. In addition to direct detection, physicists hope that the Large Hadron Collider would be able to confirm a discovery by producing and detecting the WIMP.

The data set combined with previous CDMS results also set a new upper limit on WIMP-nucleon elastic scattering, which could allow physicists to exclude some theoretical models.